What’s interesting about Heavy Rain is that its setting was inspired by Philadelphia - my beloved hometown - a city which demographically is about 50% Black. This in itself is not racist, or uncommon, as there is no shortage of posts about the absence or misrepresentation of black characters in video games. This time around there are no playable black characters, or really any black characters of note at all. Quantic Dream’s next release, in 2010, was Heavy Rain, another quick-time-event police procedural game with a decidedly somber atmosphere. There is a reason “BBC” is a common search term on pornography websites it taps into a deeply ingrained stereotype - and well-documented white hysteria - about black men as sexual predators. At first glance, you might wonder how this constitutes racism, but it has to be considered within the long historical context of how black people are represented in film: in this case, black men as insatiable nymphomaniacs. Unique to Tyler, too, is the fact that on two distinct occasions when the player gets to control Tyler, he is in the midst of, or just finished having sex with his girlfriend. From Tyler’s dialogue to the way he walks, everything hints at the possibility that Cage had never actually met a black American, and had only ever seen them in racist Hollywood movies or blaxploitation films. In scenes where you are not controlling him, it seems to be the player’s objective to prove Tyler’s incompetence, like when Lucas hides from him, under a table in plain sight. While all of the other characters have reasonable character development, Tyler is more or less a black caricature, and an accessory to main character Carla Valenti. All of the controllable (read: important) characters in the game were white, except for Sergeant Tyler Miles, a black police officer who the player controls for a brief period. With Fahrenheit (also known as Indigo Prophecy), released in 2005, Cage started off light, though about as subtle as a brick through a window. That this recent controversy has emerged as a “new” problem suggests that neither Cage, nor the gaming media at large, has been paying attention. Terrence Wiggins over at Paste Magazine, already called Cage out on on some of these issues, and others I forgot or blocked out, well over a year ago.